Transactional logging involves maintaining a transactional log that durably records a time serial history of transactions in a system. The transactional log provides information for restoring a system to a particular state in time prior to a system failure. A transactional logging system must be able to reliably and accurately restore logging functionalities after such a system failure.
Traditionally, transactional logging systems have used a dedicated log to support a single log client. Dedicated transactional logging systems are typically very robust and achieve a high performance level. However, the inventor has determined that the high level of reliability of a single log client using a dedicated logging system may actually result in overall performance degradation for a computing environment where multiple log clients are using multiple dedicated logging systems. One of the reasons for this is that each dedicated logging system independently incurs input/output (I/O) overhead to write and retrieve information. The I/O overhead results in adverse performance impact, and the impact is cumulative for each of the independent transactional logging systems. An improved transactional logging system is desirable that could overcome some of these performance problems but could still allow reliable system recovery.